We have a history of people putting Maori
under a microscope in the same way a scientist looks at an insect. The
ones doing the looking are giving themselves the power to define...Merata
Mita[1]

Introduction

The development of museums, zoos and universities in England coincided
with the era of colonialism and imperialism, and consequently such institutions
were culturally saturated with the notions of race and human classification
that were popular at the time. As Prof. Linda Tuhiwai Smith points out,

…research became institutionalized in the colonies, not
just through academic disciplines, but through learned and scientific societies
and scholarly networks. The transplanting of research institutions, including
universities, from the imperial centres of Europe enabled local scientific
interests to be organized and embedded in the colonial system. [2]

It is therefore necessary to interrogate the underlying ideologies and
assumptions of western scientific thought to begin to properly understand
the subtext of racism that informs the concept of museums and collections.
In this essay I shall examine the early development of museums and their
involvement in colonial process, as well as their role in the extensive
accumulation of indigenous objects, artifacts and human remains. I will
also look at how these collections and museum displays played an important
role in both the colonists' justification of the dispossession of indigenous
peoples, and the subsequent settler-society's creation of Hitlerian ' assimilation'
policies, which were supported by anthropologists, and resulted in the
'Stolen Generations'.

The fact that some Australian museums might be making a belated effort
to accommodate indigenous perceptions of history and culture does not absolve
the institutions of past crimes, especially as some still will not acknowledge
the historical racist and patriarchal notions that i nform their being.
I will consequently conclude by examining how Australian museums are dealing
with these post-modern challenges from the indigenous community, and see
if the progress made really does make up for the way in which museums have
contributed to the racial gulf that divides Australia today.

The Enlightenment, Colonialism and Race

The very first museum was said to have been founded in third century
Alexandria and destroyed 600 years later, and the next significant development
was not until the Renaissance when, in fifteenth century Florence the word
'museum' was used to describe the Medici collection and gallery. [3] The
great changes in European thinking over the next three hundred years led
into what became known as the Enlightenment. In eighteenth century Europe
the Enlightenment project had shaped notions of difference and 'race'.
As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze noted,

the Enlightenment's declaration of itself as 'the Age of
Reason' was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could
historically only come to maturity in modern Europe, while the inhabitants
of areas outside Europe, who were considered to be of non-European racial
and cultural origins, were consistently described and theorized as rationally
inferior and savage. [4]

Whilst ideas of 'difference' can be found long before the Enlightenment,
in Greek philosophy and Medieval art and literature, Goldberg argues that
these early beliefs and images 'furnished models that modern racism would
assume and transform according to its own lights'.[5] From the Enlightenment
project emerged a theory of knowledge called empiricism and the 'scientific
paradigm of positivism', which involves ideas on how humans can examine
and understand the natural world. Linda Tuhiwai Smith says that this 'understanding'
was viewed as being akin to measuring,[6] thus institutionalizing an obsession
with measurement, classification, and 'knowing'. As Smith points out, the
theories and ideas of the West are,

underpinned by a cultural system of classification and representation,
by views about human nature, human morality and virtue, by conceptions
of space and time, by conceptions of gender and race. [7]

The eighteenth century saw the development of race consciousness as the
colonizers became more familiar with the colonized, and Eze reminds us
that, 'Enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing
both the scientific and popular perceptions of the human race'.[8] Roberts
says of the Enlightenment that its greatest political importance lay in
its legacies to the future, and that the 18th century was thought
to have, '… not merely to have invented earthly happiness as a feasible
goal but also the thought that it could be measured and it could be promoted
through the exercise of reason. Those ideas all had profound political
implications.'[9]

Profound implications indeed, as these notions developed into ideas
of collecting, classification and display of firstly things natural, and
then human beings as Europe expanded into other peoples' worlds. The very
expedition on which Captain Cook 'discovered' Australia was in fact a scientific
expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. The voyage was sponsored
and equipped by the Royal Society in London which supervised the Greenwich
Observatory, responsible for ultimately setting a world standard of time
measurement.[10] The Royal Society, like most 'scientific' associations
of the day, had began life, and still largely remained a group of amateurs
and part-time enthusiasts. The society was dominated by, 'gentlemanly dabblers
who could not by any stretch of the imagination have been called professional
scientists but who lent to these bodies the indefinable but important weight
of their standing and respectability'[11]

On board Cook's ship, Endeavour, was Botanist Joseph Banks who,
reflecting the collecting, cataloguing and classification mania of the
Royal Society, kept an extensive and intricate record of the voyage. His
catalogue included not just a detailed daily diary, but also weather reports,
tides, lists and illustrations of birds, plants and animals and peoples
he encountered. Much of the flora collected by Banks was to find its way
back to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, which after being established
in the 1770s, was to become an important repository and exhibiting site
for plant specimens from around the world. The Royal Botanic Gardens at
Kew came to symbolize the connection between education, science, technology
and imperialism during the nineteenth century, and its displays were arranged
geographically to create the effect of 'travelling around the world' for
the visitor.

Throughout this era, collecting accompanied European acquisition of
space, and as Paul Fox noted, each 'collection of objects constructed an
image of a place previously unknown to Europeans'. When placed in museums
these objects were 'transformed by their context into something that could
be seen both as exotic and as typifying a place or people'.[12] As Smith
notes, 'colonialism was not just about collection. It was also about re-arrangement,
re-presentation and re-distribution'.[13]

In 1859 Charles Darwin published Origin of the Species which
had an immediate impact, and when these theories developed to incorporate
a general theory of human and social development, the notion was used by
some to justify conceptions of superior and inferior peoples and nations.
According to Smith,

'the concept of survival of the fittest used to explain
the evolution of species in the natural world, was applied enthusiastically
to the human world. It became a very powerful belief that indigenous peoples
were inherently weak and therefore…would die out.' [14]

This notion that the 'natives' of Australia, America and the Pacific were
dying races fueled the mania for collecting artifacts and body parts of
indigenous peoples. These events had coincided with the shift in mid-nineteenth
century scientific outlook when the influence of racialism on scientific
outlook strengthened and there occurred a drift in belief from 'monogenism'
to 'polygenism'. Griffiths observed the result was, 'that by the 1850s,
European and British scientists were moving towards a "scientific racism",
a classification of the peoples of the world into fixed and distinct racial
types'.[15]

As the booty plundered from other cultures of all parts of the British
empire began to fill the storehouses of the British Museum, in 1861 land
was purchased in South Kensington to build a new Museum of Natural History.
When completed in 1881, this new museum initially constructed its displays
to counter Darwinism, but under a new director, Henry Flower, in 1884 different
ideas of scientific organization emerged and the museum became an advocate
of evolution. Other new ideas about displaying objects in a manner to educate
the public, with labels and arranged around a specific context, and an
implied hierarchy in display practices became very influential in the new
colonial museums of Australia and America.

Australian Museums, the Colonial Mentality and Crimes Against
Humanity

The colonies were close behind the 'Mother country' when it came to
the proliferation of literary and learned societies which soon developed
colonial models of British Botanical and Zoological Gardens and museums.
As Fox noted, the 'colonial museum existed in a political space defined
from the imperial centre. Consequently, the object in this museum existed
physically in one place, while the knowledge about it resided elsewhere'.[16]
In New Zealand in 1867, even before the establishment of a university,
legislation was passed to create a public museum and the New Zealand Institute
which published the first scholarly NZ journal for research on the Maori.[17]

In America the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology opened in 1866 in
Harvard and in Australia one of the earliest public institutions was the
Australian Museum, Sydney founded in 1827 when the Colonial Secretary in
London provided an initial grant of £200. The idea had been around
the colony since 1821 when the Philosophical Society of Australasia had
been founded and was not opened to the public on its present site until
1857. The Colonial Museum was administered by the Colonial administration
until 1836 when its name changed to the Australian Museum.[18] In more
recent times Dylan Thomas said of this institution, 'This museum should
be in a museum'.[19]

Melbourne was founded in 1835 and soon after gold was discovered at
Ballarat and Bendigo and the population soared from 10,000 in 1841 to 100,000
in less than ten years.[20] In 1854 the colonial government set aside £2,000
'towards the establishment of a Museum of Natural History' and March 1st
of that year is officially recognized as the commencing date of the museum.
Three months later the museum's first Zoologist/Director, William Blandowski,
was one of eight men who established the Victorian Philosophical and Literary
Society. In 1856 the museum was moved to the University of Melbourne where
it was later to come under the influence of one Professor Baldwin Spencer,
who had earlier been involved in the establishment of the Pitt-Rivers collection
at Oxford. Spencer had been appointed as the first Chair of Biology at
Melbourne University in 1887,[21] and remains a controversial figure in
the eyes of some indigenous peoples. Thus the museum became connected to
developing controversies in the academic disciplines of anthropology, biology
and ethnography.

The nineteenth century had also seen the emergence of Anthropology as
a 'science', and ethnography evolved as a form of culture collecting. Smith
said of anthropology that, 'of all the disciplines (it) is the one most
closely associated with the study of the Other and with the defining of
primitivism.' She went on to suggest the, 'ethnographic "gaze" of anthropology
has collected, classified and represented other cultures' to such an extent
that Anthropologists are the academics most disliked by a wide range of
indigenous peoples.[22] Perhaps this was in part because it was anthropologists
more than any other academic discipline that worked closely with the colonial
administrators of 'native affairs'.

As Cowlishaw has observed, in 1928 when Anthropology was established
at Sydney University it was almost immediately was co-opted into involvement
in the training of colonial 'patrol officers' for Papua New Guinea and
the Northern Territory. Anthropologists became both the architects, builders
and long-term maintainers of the policy of assimilation, and yet, as Cowlishaw
states,

Neither the relationship between anthropological scholarship
and the state nor the colonizing process was problematised. Applying the
science of anthropology apparently did not require any intellectual scrutiny.
[23]

Social Darwinism had also become very popular in Australia, especially
among the scientific community. Markus said that for scientists, administrators
and politicians,

...racial categories provided the organizing concepts of
the three groups; that racial assumptions dominated the work of academics
and administrators; that while administrators took an interest in academic
research, that nearly all politicians derived their racial categories from
practical experience...[24]

The Elder Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1926 theorized
that Aborigines were, 'too low in the scale of humanity' to benefit from
'the civilizing influence of Anglo Saxon rule'.[25] In the 1920's and 30's
Australia's Aborigines were of immense curiosity to scientists and academics
who believed that they were the 'missing link' species that would advance
the cause of Social Darwinism. Markus noted, 'one doesn't have to read
extensively to discern that a central concern of anatomists was to establish
whether Aborigines were closer to the animal than human'.[26] Indigenous
peoples throughout the colonies were beleaguered by 'scientists' interested
in such things as similarities between Aborigines and Chimpanzees, brain
capacity and cranium size. One study in 1920 concluded that, 'the average
brain capacity of Aborigines was between the normal medium intelligence
of twelve or thirteen year old children'[27]

These ideas and attitudes were reflected in the journals, exhibitions
and displays of indigenous culture and artifacts by Australian museums
as Aborigines were cast as 'a dying race'. With the collusion of the anthropological
establishment, a political plan evolved which developed into an Australian
policy of "assimilation". The theory was that mixed-race people should
be absorbed into the general white community over a period of time. At
the same time the "full-bloods" would die off, thus maintaining the desired
racial homogeneity of Australian society. This plan found expression when,
on 21st April 1937, the first ever conference of Commonwealth
and State Aboriginal authorities declared as its major resolution, under
the general heading 'Destiny of the Race',

That this conference believes that the destiny of the natives
of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate
absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends
that all efforts be directed to that end.[28]

Writing a decade after this conference, the former Western Australian Protector
of Aborigines, Mr. A. O. Neville, revealed himself as an advocate of miscegenation
as a means of eradicating a potential future race problem. As an influential
former administrator in Aboriginal affairs he contended that to encourage
so-called 'half-bloods' to intermarry with either white men or other 'mixed-bloods'
('octoroons', 'quadroons', etc.) would produce children with increasingly
less 'Aboriginal blood' through several generations. Thus any future 'racial
problem' could be avoided.[29]

These notions became embedded in Australian popular culture and have
been central to most peoples understanding of 'Aborigines' for the past
hundred years, resonating down through generations of Anglo-Australians.
To this day one can still frequently encounter members of the academy and
museum boards who cling to the old fallacies of the past, with no insight
into the hegemonic stance they take. Even as some major Australian museums
do face the challenges thrown up by indigenous demands for a voice and
reassessment of the past, it still seems far too little far too late.

New Attitudes Develop in Some Australian Museums

The very latest in Australian museums will be the Museum Victoria in
Melbourne, which cost $288 million and will feature an indigenous centre,
Bunjilaka.
In this indigenous space the museum says it will, through a series of exhibitions,
explore the 'contemporary rights, recognition and perspectives of Australia's
indigenous communities', and also 'serve as a gateway to Museum Victoria's
magnificent collection of indigenous cultural material'.[30] This is clearly
a new attitude and approach by museums, but it dates back only seven years
to 1993, which was International Year of Indigenous People. It was a period
of intense national and international scrutiny and soul-searching about
indigenous-white relations in Australia, and ironically also coincided
with increasing international interest in Aboriginal art and culture.

Local museums began to establish indigenous galleries and invite co-operation
from indigenous curators and advisory committees. Since 1985 the South
Australian Museum, which claims to have the 'world's largest and most comprehensive
collection of Australian Aboriginal material culture',[31] has taken the
view that it is merely the custodian or trustee of its 3000 piece collection
of indigenous artefacts rather than "owners". But even these measures are
regarded as tokenistic by some indigenous curators and historians who argue
strongly for less non-indigenous anthropologists on museum staff and more
social historians.[32] Given the sorry history of people associated with
the museum movement in Australia over the past 150 years, one might expect
more in the way of reconciliatory gestures in the present.

Conclusion

Paul Fox asks the question, 'do Australians inhabit a postcolonial world
or a landscape of colonial memories?' He points out that in the process
of reconstruction by museums and anthropologists of Aboriginal culture
through European recording, classification and representation, the indigenous
voice was silenced.[33] Goldberg further argues that today's 'Western ways
of viewing, talking about and interacting with the world at large are intricately
embedded in racialized discourses'.[34]

At the turn of the millenium, the indigenous voice is again being heard
despite continuing attempts to muzzle and mute; as Australian museums and,
to a lesser extent, tertiary academic institutions begin reluctantly to
face the truth of their own history. The belated acknowledgement by a few
of Australia's major museums that their past practices have impinged on
indigenous human and cultural rights should not be prematurely celebrated.
It is not so much the progress that should be examined, but rather the
broader failure of many areas of academia to do the same thing. After all,
museums and universities developed at the same point in history, derive
from the same European intellectual and 'scientific' origins, and mutually
sustain each other through research and staffing.

Why is it then that museums seem able to acknowledge past errors and
begin to make amends in meaningful ways, but their sister institutions
universities and their departments of anthropology, archaeology and social
sciences stubbornly resist change. In that sense, Australian museums might
be seen to be very progressive today, given their record of the past one
hundred and fifty years, when compared to an institution such as the University
of Melbourne. The university not only has done little to redress the role
it has played, and continues to play, in the misrepresentation of indigenous
culture and history, but continues to flaunt its association with disreputable
figures from another era of racial ideas. The prominent "Spencer-Baldwin
Building" is named after a former director of the Melbourne Museum, who
in 1927 wrote,

Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures often
crude and quaint that elsewhere have passed away and given place to higher
forms. This applies equally to the Aboriginal as the platypus and kangaroo.
[35]

The irony today is that the new Museum of Melbourne would be embarrassed
by such aspects of its history, whereas University of Melbourne glorifies
the man and honors the sentiments by naming a university space (on indigenous
land) after him. Thus demonstrating the miniscule progress made by those
who might seek a more enlightened academy.